A Shortcut to Paradise (29 page)

“I suppose I must have if Montse hasn't thrown it in the rubbish bin,” I replied, wondering what he was leading up to. “Don't tell me you want to read it! It's really bad…”

“Bring it to the office,” he replied drily. “Make sure you don't forget. I'll expect you at twelve.” And then he hung up.

I was intrigued by my brother's laconic call, but, as Borja sometimes does that kind of thing, I took it philosophically. It was still only half-past ten, so I had time enough to enjoy a leisurely breakfast and shower. Once I was dressed, cleaned and combed, I searched for the novel, which was in the dining room, half hidden on a shelf, on top of a book of short stories. I put it in a bag and ran to catch the bus that would take me to the office. I was there by a quarter to twelve. So was Borja.

Thanks to the rather steep fees we'd charged after solving that case, which Clàudia had settled to the last nought without the least protest, my brother had decided to buy an expensive, powerful electric fan we were now trying out for the first time. Although we were about to shut up shop and go on holiday, we still thought we'd get our money's worth from that gadget this year given that summer extends into October. Of course, we had an air-conditioning contraption in the office, but it didn't work, like the radiators. It was yet another decorative detail, like the fake mahogany doors that supposedly led to our offices, which only hid a stretch of wall. I was all sweaty, and I greeted my brother and let the breeze from the fan blow away the sweat dripping down my cheeks, then handed him the bag and asked why he'd suddenly spawned an interest in Marina Dolç's manuscript. My brother smiled and winked. Some crazy idea was buzzing around his head.

Borja anxiously grabbed the bag and, the moment he took the manuscript out, the pages began to fly from his hands and flutter around the office. I'd forgotten to tie them up with the rubber band for trussing chickens, which I'd mislaid God knows where. The powerful fan did the rest, and in a few seconds the office was full of typed pages zooming in every direction. Borja was upset and clicked his tongue.

“Fuck! What a disaster!”

“It's one hell of a fan.”

“We'd better collect them up,” he said, switching it off. “I said I'd be there at one.”

“At one? To do
what
exactly?”

“To take the novel to the publishers. Apparently the other copies have disappeared. They've been thrown away or lost. This copy,” he went on, referring to the pile of pages scattered over the floor, “is the only one left. The secretary at the publishers forgot to make a photocopy when she sent it to Clàudia for you to read. This is the original manuscript, in fact.”

“You can't be serious! The members of the jury all had their own copy…”

“They've thrown them away. It's what you're supposed to do.”

“I don't believe it.”

“The novel was typed, so there's no diskette or anything,” he continued as he collected up the pages.

“But now we have a slight problem, my lad,” I warned. “These pages aren't numbered.”

Borja stopped picking up pages and looked at me aghast. He'd turned pallid.

“Fuck me…” he mumbled as he checked there wasn't a numbered page anywhere. “How the hell will we?…”

“Perhaps her niece in Sant Feliu has a copy,” I suggested.

Borja shook his head.

“No, I've asked her. Maite looked for a copy but she couldn't find one anywhere. Obviously her aunt never bothered to make copies… So this” – there was a look of despair in his eyes – “is the only existing copy of what is reputed to be Marina Dolç's masterpiece.”

“So we're well and truly in it!”

We surveyed the scene. Five hundred unnumbered pages littered the room. Luckily the window was shut. There was no way we could fix this.

“You'd better phone and tell them what's happened. Perhaps with a little patience…”

My brother shook his head.

“The problem is the publishers are prepared to pay a reward to get their hands on this manuscript because they are desperate. Just imagine, a novel that's cost them a hundred thousand euros and they don't have a copy! They've offered me three thousand euros if I take it today.” He paused to ponder. “But if we take a pile of pages without any order to them…”

“I don't see a solution.”

Borja looked at me in that way I've grown to dislike. I swallowed. I knew he'd just had an idea. Another crazy idea.

“You've read it.” He was testing the waters.

“Yes, but it's twelve o'clock, and an hour's no time. Forget it. Perhaps we could do it over a week, patiently… But I think even that would be tight.”

“I'll ring them and say I'll be there at four, after lunch. I don't want to upset them.”

“Don't you ever listen to me?” I insisted. “I told you in three hours I'll only have made a start!”

He smiled. His eyes were shining like when he was a young kid and up to no good.

“You just watch.”

Borja picked up a pile of pages and started to order them following a very curious method: the last lines of one page simply had to mesh – more or less – with the first of another, irrespective of any meaning. The fact the novel was a kind of monologue and not divided into chapters made it even more difficult to find the original order, but Borja simply got on with the job.

“‘He passionately caressed… the trumpet she gave her nephew for Christmas?' Borja, it doesn't match up,” I remarked, not needing to exercise much critical insight. “And what about this? ‘She felt a searing pain… on the sleeve of the blue dress sewn by a Parisian seamstress?'”

“No, that sounds fine. Don't be silly!”

I shrugged my shoulders. As I knew my protests would serve no purpose, I let him get on with it. In the end, we had half an hour to spare.

“But no way is this the novel that Marina Dolç wrote!” I exclaimed. “Everybody will see that.”

“I'm not so sure. Her publisher said he'd only skimmed over it, and I expect the jury members did the same. Besides, you heard the things the critics were saying at Mariona's, the mental fog they live in… Let me do what a man has to do.”

“I'm not sure… It's supposed to be Marina Dolç's posthumous magnum opus… I don't think it's ethical,” I declared as we left the office.

“Bah, I'm sure the publishers will sort it out when they get round to editing it,” he responded knowingly as he bagged the pages. “Let's stop soul-searching and go get the three thousand euros. After all, it is only a novel.”

29

 

 

 

Novel

 

A Shortcut to Paradise
Maria Campana (Marina Dolç)
The Golden Apple Fiction Prize
The Chameleon Press
Barcelona 2006

 

Agustí Planer

When a writer we are accustomed to see selling astonishing seven-digit numbers of her industrially packaged novels to a mainly non-reading public surprises us with a work that must surely enter the literary canon alongside the great masters, this is a rare, if not unique, event. This is indubitably the case with
A Shortcut to Paradise
, the posthumous novel by Maria
Campana, that many predict will turn the literary world topsy-turvy and occupy a place of honour in the annals of Catalan letters.

The first thing the reader must ask himself when confronted by this difficult and dense novel is how is it possible that the author of conventional novels of such scant literary merit like
The Rage of the Goddesses
and
Milk Chocolate
, to mention only a couple, can be the same person who penned the bold and lucid reflections we discern in
A Shortcut to Paradise
. The answer doesn't come easily. Maria Campana, better known as Marina Dolç, made her debut on the Catalan literary scene in 1993 and none of her previous novels anticipated the explosion of technique and will to experiment we discern in
A Shortcut to Paradise
. We don't know how long she took to write it or even when she started, and her tragic death will possibly leave unanswered most of the questions academics will ask from now on. Nonetheless, it is to be hoped that this splendid novel will initiate a more attentive and subtle reading of her entire oeuvre, that may perhaps reveal aspects latent in her previous works that a superficial glance – or one informed by prejudice – unfortunately skipped over.

Beneath the seemingly commercial title of this novel one detects the throbbing beat of one of the crucial works of twentieth-century human thought:
Off The Beaten Track
(
Holzwege
) by Martin Heidegger, that subtly provides us with the key to its interpretation. Maria Campana's at once dazzling and opaque prose is a forest full of paths, leading nowhere in particular, that the writer wanders in an attempt to vanquish the anguish (
Angst
) generated by the consciousness of death. This journey, as the philosopher from Heidelberg wrote, is a necessary step in order to attain self-transcendence and leave behind the trivia of existence, the fall (
Verfallen
), in order to open our selves up to a “state of resolution” (
Entschlossenheit
) that climaxes when fear in the face of death felt by the novel's main character – the countess of Catalan stock Lucrècia Berluschina de Castelgandolfo – transmutes into freedom in the face of death. The countess is Everyman, individuals with trivial lives heading towards an understanding of our being (
Seinsverständnis
) that ineluctably compels us to formulate
the
ontic question in relation to the nature of existence. Step by step, along the forest paths that Maria Campana treads with a prose that is at once poetic and disturbing, the novelist reminds us that that which is man's, what Heidegger denominates as “being there”(
Dasein
), is not the mere fact of existing, but, as the philosopher suggests, the ontic possibility of being. We are in this world only as project (
Entwurf
) and are – and this is the great lesson one draws from the novel – what we come to be.

Maria Campana, in her last novel, decided to eschew easy success and crude complicity with her readership and accepted the challenge of taking risks and placed her writing at the service of the quest for aesthetic endeavour with an evidently stylistic intent, a risk that few authors dare to run in this day and age.
A Shortcut to Paradise
, like all great novels, contains more poetry than prose, and that is not happenstance. Prose explains and analyses; poetry condenses and interrogates. All great literary figures have been great poets or have finally sought refuge in the stunning lyricism of verse to speak to us about the tragic awareness of our mortality. It is always affirmed that Catalonia is a land of poets, and
the case of Maria Campana only confirms this truism once again. Between Parmenides's opaque
Poem
and the disturbing prose of
A Shortcut to Paradise
there is the poetic, hope-filled thread that Theseus trails to avoid losing his way in the labyrinth of nauseous existence, the same thread traced by all the great works of Western literature, irrespective of literary genre. With the timeless wisdom of an Ariadne, Maria Campana accompanies us on these tortuous short cuts,
off the beaten track
, and confronts us with the irresolvable paradoxes of our human condition. The closing sentences of her novel sum up this epistemological and stylistic challenge and focus the reader on
the
transcendental ontic reflection: “When she bid farewell to her lover, the countess asked herself who she was, a swarm of insects and butterflies flying in every direction. Spring was definitively sprung, and the warm air wafting through the window made her drowsy and sank her into a state of intense melancholy. She decided to pour out a glass of champagne and, quite unawares, fell asleep and dreamed of a forest.”

Epilogue

When Oriol Sureda got up that morning at exactly eight o'clock, nervous but in an excellent mood, he decided he would go to the barbers for a trim. He was expecting an extremely important visitor that afternoon and wanted to look smart. He'd hardly closed his eyes the whole night, but had got up strangely infused with energy and couldn't stop smiling. He felt as if he'd become reconciled with the world, he was hungry and ate breakfast without grumbling about the blandness of the biscuits or the watery nature of the decaffeinated coffee he was condemned to drink for the rest of his life. After breakfast, he took a shower and dressed while humming the Toast from the
Traviata
, in the same good mood he'd got up in and ignoring the jokes and gross insults from the other inmates.

It was sunny outside, but the morning still retained the cool air of the first days of spring. When he opened the window, Oriol thought he caught a lungful of the scent of freshly mown lawn. He looked through the bars and saw how the lilies and roses had flowered in the night and changed the wintry visage of that grey landscape that was beginning to seem too familiar. The trees were covered in small leaves gently rustling in the breeze, and
even the lawn seemed carpeted by minuscule daisies that contrasted with the exuberant bushes of red roses growing along the walls. He stood there endlessly contemplating that landscape out of a pastoral ballad until the auxiliary was forced to move him away from the window and lead him into the recreation room; he decided to ask the nurse's permission to cut a few roses with the idea of offering them to his guest that afternoon.

“What roses?” asked the nurse, looking out at the concrete yard Oriol was observing in ecstasy from one of the security windows in the television room. “There aren't any flowers here. And certainly not any roses, they've got thorns and you could hurt yourself…”